Rise to Fame
His stepfather took him to see Goldfinger when he was 11. EON Productions signed him to play Bond in 1986, then NBC exercised his Remington Steele contract and pulled him back to television. Timothy Dalton got the part. He waited nine more years. GoldenEye (1995) earned $350 million worldwide and dragged the franchise back from a slow fade. The delay, as it turned out, made a better story than any of the films.
In the Spotlight
Getting replaced by Daniel Craig in 2005, reportedly after asking for $25 million for a fifth film, was the kind of exit that ends careers. Mamma Mia! (2008) didn't help; the Miami Herald compared his singing to a wounded raccoon. But he kept working. His MobLand series on Paramount+ beat Yellowstone in streaming numbers in 2025 and got renewed for a second season. He's one of those actors the industry assumed was done at 50 and is still proving them wrong at 72.
Side Notes
He walked past a fire-eater on his way to an art class in 1969, stopped to watch, and never made it to the art class. The fire-eating got written into a Remington Steele episode years later. His first wife Cassandra Harris died of ovarian cancer in 1991; his adopted daughter Charlotte died of the same disease in 2013. He returned to painting during Cassandra's illness and has kept at it ever since. His environmental work runs deeper than celebrity causes. He helped block a salt factory from being built on the last pristine Pacific gray whale breeding ground off Baja California.